This disclosure relates generally to systems and methods for maintaining the displayed pricing of retail inventory. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for maintaining promotional price tags/signage in a retail store.
There are a large number of retail chains worldwide across various market segments, including pharmacy, grocery, home improvement, and others. One practice that many such chains have in common is sale advertising and merchandising. An element of this practice is the printing and posting of sale item signage within each store, very often at a weekly cadence.
Managed print services vendors providing this weekly signage have an interest in supplying the signage to all stores within a chain. It would be advantageous to each store if this signage was printed and packed in the order in which an employee posts the signs on the shelves (which is also the order in which a person encounters sale products while walking down each aisle). Doing so eliminates a non-value-add step of manually having to pre-sort the signage into the specific order appropriate for a given store.
Unfortunately, with few exceptions, retail chains cannot control or predict the product locations across each of their stores. This may be due to a number of factors: store manager discretion, local product merchandising campaigns, different store sizes and layouts, etc. Thus it would be advantageous to a retail chain to be able to collect product location data (referred to as a store profile) automatically across its stores, since each store could then receive signage in an appropriate order to avoid a pre-sorting step.
The system described herein detects and recognizes various promotional price tags/signage in a retail store. It may be used to improve the retail store management: resource and efficiency, by auditing missing or out-of-date promotional price tags/signage and informing staff where they are located.